A Boring Dystopia

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Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will (futurism.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.

As the MIT Technology Review reports, an Australian woman named Rita Leggett who received an experimental seizure-tracking brain-computer interface (BCI) implant from the now-defunct company Neuravista in 2010 has become a stark example not only of the ways neurotech can help people, but also of the trauma of losing access to them when experiments end or companies go under.

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[+] [email protected] 50 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago

One relevant detail is that this was not a self contained device, it was for monitoring likelihood of seizures and had an external wireless interface. So my guess (this is pure speculation) on what happened is, the company owned the monitoring device, and the signals from the in-brain device were proprietary and encrypted. They couldn't force her to have surgery but they could take back the external interface which was their property, and without that the in-brain device did nothing. Then the patient agreed to surgery because there was no further benefit to keeping it in her head and probably greater health risks to doing so.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm sure if she revoked the informed consent they never would have done the implant to begin with. It's an experimental procedure so you kind of need to agree to being expiramented on to participate.